Gramophone, an agritech startup, based out of Indore, has raised ₹24 crore in series A funding from Info Edge, Raveen Sastry, co-founder at Myntra, Asha Impact and Better Capital.
While, there was no disclosure about how the startup has planned to utilise the funds, Tauseef Khan, Co-Founder & CEO of Gramophone said, “Gramophone is on a mission to create a future of farming that puts ‘Farmers First’ by democratising knowledge, building transparency in transactions, and creating a connected ecosystem for farmers’ business. We are excited to see how farmers are adopting newer opportunities to maximise their income. This investment will enable us to invest aggressively on product, data science and scale operations across geographies.”
Gramophone was founded by Tauseef Ahmed Khan, Nishant Vats Mahatre, Harshit Gupta, and Ashish Rajan Singh in 2016. It provides actionable agronomic insights coupled with last mile delivery of quality agriculture inputs to farmers, through a smartphone app and a call center.
Kitty Agarwal from Info Edge said, “Agriculture is the backbone of India’s economy and in our view, solving for the pain points of farmers, right from input procurement to financing to output market linkages makes for a huge opportunity. The company has shown tremendous growth and witnessed strong adoption among the farmer community since we first invested a year ago.”
The startup claims farmers on the Gramophone platform access plot level personalized insights enabling a 15-20 percent average reduction in cost of cultivation, and a 30-40% increase in yield to smallholder farmers. With lakhs of farmers consistently in touch with the startup, data generated via such user’s interaction is going to be the key ingredient for integrating credit and allied services, unlocking farmer’s true earning potential, it said in a release.
“We were impressed by the Gramophone team’s intuitive understanding of customers’ needs, and by their ability to build a highly effective and scalable platform. We are excited to partner with them as they tap into this vast and underserved market,” said Kartik Desai, Executive Director, Asha Impact.
Besides Gramophone, other agritech startups include Boheco, Crofarm, Agricx Lab, Gold Farm, Agrowave, etc.